Is my ATI GPU dieing?
 

Hey all,

I've been having problems with my "ultimate video experience" (ati slogan) since I got this laptop. I absolutely could not get the linux drivers working (but that's not what this post is about). So I kind of gave up for a while.

Recently i've been booting into windows (for games, of course) and i've been having very strange issues with my video card. After playing a game, or even just sitting around on the desktop, the screen just get overrun with garbage, and textures get replaced with colors in games.

Here are a few screenshots:
http://iamtheworkforce.com/images/at...experience.jpg
http://iamtheworkforce.com/images/Gunz000.jpg
http://iamtheworkforce.com/images/Gunz001.jpg
http://iamtheworkforce.com/images/Gunz002.jpg

I upgraded video drivers in windows, but I'm almost 99% sure this is a hardware issue, because if I reboot (as opposed to shuting down) the bios still has this garbage, and it remains until I turn off the laptop completely.

My laptop is an HP, i'm not sure if anyone else has seen this, but if you know of anything I can do it would probably be better than waiting for this. It seems to happen anywhere from 1 minute of start up to whenever it wants, so it is completely random.

Also, I have never had this happen in linux. Is it possible this card is dead and that's why this happens? And also why the linux drivers don't work? I'm totally out of ideas here.


Thanks guys,
- mtndew

Is the video circuitry built in to the motherboard or is it on a card that you can replace?

It's embedded :(

From what I can see, it looks like it's time to do a full data backup and move on to a completely new system. Circuit rot has a tendency to spread meaning, in your case, if the video is not working as it should, something else (e.g. your IDE interface) can also stop working and without any warning.

Does it happen if you use either AC with out battery or just the battery. If it only happens with AC with out the battery, then you need to replace the AC adapter. If it is neither, under clock the GPU memory until it clears up. Unfortunately you have to do this in Windows. If you try under clock the GPU memory and it still has the same problems, it could be the LCD driver (hardware). There is nothing you can do to this chip, but do a a deep compress air clean. DO NOT USE A VACUUM CLEANER. However, do not do anything if you think your notebook is under warrenty.

I've experienced this issue with my HP ze4315 laptop which has an ATI mobility U1. Oddly, the only times this has happened to me was when also using a wireless connection. I have DRI enabled using the Xorg supplied driver, but the only game I play on it is Doom Legacy. The fact that it only happened while online lead me to suspect an issue with the drivers for the wifi cards. Since upgrading them to ndiswrapper-1.21 and zd1211-r83 it hasn't happened again.